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5 Ways to Get More Out of Salesforce.com Using Gamification

Enterprise gamification has gained a lot of traction over the past year. As with other “firsts” in Gamification, Bunchball has led the way in the use of game mechanics to motivate employees within the enterprise. We’ve worked with companies to integrate game mechanics across a wide spectrum of enterprise applications and developed Nitro for Salesforce. Nitro for Salesforce is the first out-of-the-box solution for adding gamification to Salesforce.com and was awarded the Best New App Award at Dreamforce 2011.

When we talk to organizations about gamification, common questions that arise are “Where are game mechanics best suited to motivate employees?” or “Where can our organization start with Gamification?” While game mechanics can deliver value to a wide number of functions and the answer should be tailored based on the needs of each individual organization, here are some ideas to get you started:

Sales Teams

Sales Contests and “spiff” programs have been around as long as sales teams. Managers have long struggled with manual tracking methods while participants have found themselves with little visibility to the results until after the contest has ended. Clearly, if the goal of the contest is to drive behavior, this is a major downfall. Nitro for Salesforce can automate these contests while providing users with visibility into where they stand in the contest by tracking activities such as call volume, lead conversions and opportunity wins.

Customer Service Reps

Customer service reps are often measured on the number of cases resolved, speed of case resolution, and customer satisfaction scores. This provides a wealth of quantitative data accessible by Nitro for Salesforce around which a gamification program can be built.

Customer Service Case Deflection

Many companies are investing in the Salesforce customer portal and knowledge base to enable customers to self-service support inquiries. However, potentially as a result of convenience, potentially just out of habit, many customers still pick up the phone and call customer service reps. Game mechanics in Nitro for Salesforce can encourage customers to not only use the existing knowledge base content but also to contribute content and respond to questions in public Q&A forums using Salesforce.com’s Answers module. One customer supporting another not only reduces the burden on an organization’s support teams, but also displays an active community to potential customers.

Training and Education

Whether facilitated through a formal Learning Management System (LMS) or through Salesforce.com directly, new employee training and ongoing employee education are generally high priorities. They are also areas where organizations struggle with a lack of motivation and limited analytics. Game mechanics can motivate employees to complete the required training while also providing managers with detailed analytics around what is working and what may need fine tuning. Since Nitro can be leveraged across platforms, certifications or points earned in an LMS system can be displayed on a User’s profile in Salesforce.com.

Chatter Adoption

More and more organizations are buying into the vision of the Social Enterprise yet still struggle with how to make it a reality. As a reformed Chatter-skeptic, I fully understand the hesitance facing many users: “does this tool provide any real value for me?” Nitro for Salesforce served as the catalyst to convert me into a believer. When I began at Bunchball, I found that posting to Chatter was a quick way to boost my meager score in Nitro. Since others had discovered the same, our Chatter community was flush with active users looking for conversations where they could add value. As a result, users were able to experience the value of the system firsthand. As a Sales Engineer, I discovered that I could answer a technical question once publicly instead of 35 times via email. We still have an active community as everyone has now seen firsthand the value Chatter provides.

As the market leader and innovator in gamification, Bunchball’s gamification solutions have motivated more than 125 million users to complete more than 20 billion actions on behalf of over 300 customers.